Banni Chowk’s Silent Queue Of The Unemployed
Asem Mustafa Awan
Islamabad: Every morning, they arrive before the city fully wakes. They come carrying drills, paint buckets, cutters, hammers and rusted toolboxes. Some sit silently against crumbling walls. Others stare at the road as motorcycles, rickshaws and expensive vehicles pass by without slowing down. They wait for a stranger to stop and ask a simple question: “Kaam karogay?”
For many of these men gathered at Rawalpindi’s Banni Chowk, that question decides whether their children eat meat or only bread. Whether medicine is bought or postponed again. Whether school fees are paid or another child quietly disappears from a classroom forever.
The photograph is not merely about labourers waiting for work. It is about a country where skill exists, but opportunity does not.
One man holds equipment worth thousands of rupees but has no guarantee of earning even a few hundred by sunset. Another is a trained painter. A third knows electrical repair. Yet they sit for hours under a punishing sun, hoping inflation does not defeat them before evening arrives.
Their faces carry no slogans. No protests. Only exhaustion.
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International reports continue to warn about rising poverty, shrinking purchasing power and millions struggling below the poverty line. Utility bills rise. Food prices climb. Rent follows. For the poor, survival itself has become a calculation. Eat less. Delayed treatment. Pull children from school. Borrow more. Sleep hungry.
The tragedy is not that these men are unskilled. The tragedy is that they are needed but unused.
A broken economy does not collapse in parliament halls first. It collapses quietly on roadside pavements where skilled workers wait endlessly for someone to hire them for a single day.
The tools lying beside them tell another story. Pakistan still has hands willing to work. Shoulders still willing to carry weight. Men are still willing to labour with dignity instead of begging.
But dignity alone does not pay electricity bills. The state speaks often of development, growth and relief packages. Yet in streets like Banni Chowk, development is measured differently. It is measured by how many labourers return home empty-handed before sunset.
These men are not statistics in an economic survey. They are fathers. Sons. Breadwinners. And every passing vehicle that does not stop adds another hour to the longest wait of their lives.
Photo Credit: APP
